Mapping of the Southeast: The First Two Centuries

Mapping of the Southeast: The First Two Centuries WrLLiAM P. Cumming Davidson College A person who walks along the sidewalk in front of a house he has not seen before finds it difficult to judge the interior shape and contents of the building and how far back the surrounding lot extends; likewise, a tourist who drives through a city on a highway route can only guess the direction of the residential suburbs, the number of the parks, and the size and nature of landmarks that would be familiar to him after several years' residence. So, when the early navigators along our eastern coast and the pioneers on the Indian trails that crossed the Piedmont tried to put down in maps their ideas of the land that they were discovering, their conceptions were often fantastically wrong. Some of them believed that the Pacific Ocean lay only a few miles west of the Outer Banks of the North Carolina coast, and others thought that between the Atlantic and Piedmont Carolina stretched for 125 miles the long, narrow Arenosa Desert. The early navigators did not travel, as more modern surveyors have, in carefully trained and organized groups equipped with scientific instruments. Yet the early maps, spare of detail and often incorrect though they may be, are among the most valuable historical and geographical documents. They show what was known or believed about the land at different periods, the extent and limitations of knowledge at various times in the past. It is often as important to know what was believed wrongly as rightly; such errors explain actions that would otherwise be unintelligible. Early maps also show significant changes in geography that without them would not be known, such as inlets along the coast that have disappeared or changed, the location of settlements and towns that have vanished, and early boundary lines and trading routes which wars or commercial changes have erased. They give the history of the settlement of the land, often naming individual settlers, and they sometimes explain the reasons for the names given places. They illustrate boundary disputes and the coming of railroads and postal routes. And often they are themselves works of art, done in the changing styles of the times, from the imagination with which John White peopled the sea with monsters to the clear, scientific accuracy of the maps of today. From the beginning of the sixteenth century, world maps such as those by Juan da Cosa, Cantino, Caverio, and Waldseemuller showed a vaguely formed shore line or a large island mass to the northwest of the island of Cuba. Some historians think the land mass is entirely imaginary; others, such as Nunn, believe it is Cuba; Roukema identifies it as a distorted and misplaced delineation of the Yucatan Peninsula. (1) This writer believes that it is probably a report of an unrecorded voyage or voyages in which the mainland of North America was actually seen. Until well past the middle of the sixteenth century, in fact, mapping of the Southeast did not usually extend beyond attempts to delineate the coastline and give names to major landmarks observed by the navigators. 4 The Southeastern Geographer Solomon listed several mysteries that were too wonderful for him; the last two were the way of a ship in the sea and the way of a man with a maid. Perhaps no one to this day has known more than Solomon did about the way of a man with a maid, but neither Solomon nor the sixteenth century navigators had anything like the resources we have today for understanding the way of a ship with the sea. It may be useful to list briefly the sources on which the early mapmakers depended and the instruments available to the explorers: 1.Some explorers made their own maps based on their own first-hand information. These are rare and valuable, although their instruments were imperfect and their observation sometimes misleading because of preconceived ideas. 2.A second source of information for map makers were the maps that had been made previously by others. An important map often became a so-called mother map or type map and was borrowed for years, perpetuating its misconception. Some...